Tag Archives: New Zealand Rugby Union

“If Deloitte was caught with one such brazenly egregious case, just what else is there that goes unreported, and undiscovered when it comes to corporate “books”, not only in Brazil but also in the US.”

### zerohedge.com Dec 5, 2016 9:43 PMAuditor Deloitte Fined A Record $8 Million For Massive Fraud
By Tyler Durden
Remember when auditors were, by their very definition, supposed to be the embodiment of credibility, trustworthiness and moral fibre? The Brazilian arm of Big Four auditing giant, Deloitte, forgot these simple prerequisites and as a result the US auditing watchdog fined the firm a record $8 million for what amounts to massive fraud: falsifying audit reports, altering documents and providing false testimony during an investigation that unearthed what it described as its “most serious” finding of misconduct.
The US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, or PCAOB, also penalised or barred 12 former partners, including a national practice director, and auditors of the Brazil-based Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Auditores Independentes.
The Deloitte Brazil case is the first time the PCAOB has “charged a member of the Big Four auditing firms with fraud and for failing to co-operate with an investigation” according to the FT [Financial Times]. Worse, unlike banks which resolve similar cases without admitting or denying guilt, in settling, Deloitte Brazil admitted it had violated quality control standards and failed to co-operate with the auditing board’s inspection and subsequent investigation.
“This is the most serious misconduct we’ve uncovered. It’s cover-up after cover-up after cover-up,” Claudius Modesti, director of enforcement at the PCAOB, said. “As an investor you’re expecting that the audit was done properly and sufficiently and that wasn’t the case here.”
Not only was that not the case, but the details read like straight out of a fictional account of third-world crime.Read more

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd, commonly referred to as Deloitte, is a UK-incorporated multinational professional services firm with operational headquarters in New York City in the United States.
Deloitte is one of the “Big Four” accounting firms and the largest professional services network in the world by revenue and number of professionals. Deloitte provides audit, tax, consulting, enterprise risk and financial advisory services with more than 244,400 professionals globally. In FY 2016, the company earned a record $36.8 billion USD in revenues. As of 2016, Deloitte is the 6th-largest privately owned organisation in the United States.

Remember the old chestnut…. The connection between TTCF (The Trusts Community Foundation Ltd; formerly, The Trusts Charitable Foundation Inc) —and Deloitte.

“TTCF engaged Deloitte when they desperately needed an ‘independent’ audit so as to put the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) and Audit NZ off the scent. Unfortunately, even though Deloitte uncovered approximately $40k per month in mis-spent funds, TTCF ensured that was left out of the report because after all they were paying the Deloitte bill.”

Thick as a brick
Shallow as a bird bath
Not the sharpest knife in the drawer
A few sandwiches short of a picnic
Bought his doctorate online.

Come in Dr Parton….

Your correspondent was both entertained and aghast this morning when enjoying Choysa and a scone, he read Dr Parton, Aurora chair, dutifully parroting Grady Cameron’s lines in the ODT …. “aged network”, “our approach to its management is conservative”. Dr (Polly) Parton also said “it was “not appropriate” for him to respond to comments made by another chairman”. Your correspondent agrees it is not “appropriate”. It is essential to his credibility to do so, as Polly Parton is right – it is amazing that the chairman of a lines company, far away, has felt the need to make scathing comments about the lackadaisical approach to essential infrastructure he has found in the South, and called Aurora’s response “a lame excuse”. When did you last hear the CEO of a council make scathing comments about another ? —or one mayor disparage another in biting terms. It just isn’t done…. so now the attention of the entire lines industry, and the Commerce Commission is riveted upon Aurora as it has just been confirmed by the chair of Marlborough Lines, with no axe to grind, that Aurora’s mess and subsequent evasions are inexcusable.

Some other gems of the re-cycled obvious from Polly in the ODT were “Age … is one reason why we have marked so many poles for replacement” – how fascinating that the board and Mr Cameron only discovered these 40- to 60-year-old poles were aged and needed replacement around the time Mr Healey left three weeks ago.

Readers, while Aurora and Delta have an arrogant disregard for the interest of the consumers and ratepayers, they are very fearful of the Commerce Commission. And the Commerce Commission is under no illusions about the incompetence of Aurora. Not only did Aurora get warned for network failures this year, and are now ranked in the bottom 3 of the 29 lines companies for reliability, they were also warned about their lack of investment and incompetence in 2014 by the Commission.

“21. There are a number of concerns that we would particularly like to draw to Aurora’s attention … These concerns are:

21.1 Aurora’s vegetation control has been insufficient to prevent significant tree encroachment on lines, which has likely contributed to the frequency and duration of outages….”
Mr Cameron took great delight in waxing lyrical about the dedicated vegetation management unit Delta set up in 2015-16, and how Delta charged Aurora $4M for clearing 34km of lines. We now know it wasn’t anything to do with Mr Cameron, it was forced upon them by the Commerce Commission because they had neglected it for decades. In true Delta form, the cost of $130,000 per km is probably overstated by a factor of 5-10 dependent on difficulty.

“21.2 Aurora has had an increase in defective equipment incidents”.
Oh yes. Aurora’s own Asset Management Plan (AMP) spells out the failures, and impending ones, as noted in #EpicPowerFail 5. In relation to poles, Aurora reduced the number of poles it was going to replace in 2017-18, in its 2016-2026 plan, due to the mendacity of Matt Ballard, GM Capability & Risk. Reacting to public pressure and casting aside the long term plan due to a “perception problem”, without a funding plan in place is just giving the Commerce Commission all the evidence they need that the board isn’t in control and doesn’t know what it’s doing.

“21.3 There seems to be shortcomings in Aurora’s knowledge of its asset condition”.
….(Translated from bureaucratic-ese, this is : YOU ARE USELESS AND INCOMPETENT, and everything we have heard from Aurora recently confirms that this fault has become exponentially worse.

“21.4 Aurora’s reliance on its 6.6kV network as a back up to its aging 33kV cables in Dunedin could lead to major power outages.”

Ominously for the Directors, the Commission was clear about the consequences of further non-compliance, warning Aurora :

“Notwithstanding its 2013 and 2014 compliance, if Aurora fails to comply with the quality standards again, its 2012 non-compliance will be a relevant factor that may lead us towards a stronger enforcement response. Particularly relevant would be the extent to which concerns raised following Aurora’s 2012 non-compliance contributed to the second non-compliance.”

Here we are, four years later, and 3 of the 4 concerns are front and centre of the latest crisis. A lot of words have been written, meetings held, and plans begun, but the network has continued to decline. Unless the Commerce Commission has another spineless apologist like Rebstock of the Audit Office investigating, then the springs in the boardroom ejector seats are tightening.

Readers, we are all frustrated that Mr Cameron, Mr Ballard, and the directors have not a thread of integrity left among them, preferring eventual forcible removal (health problems anyone ?) to decency. But readers, how delicious will it be when they are kicked out, as that will almost certainly be the end of all of their directorial ambitions. Getting kicked out by the Government is the sort of thing that even the Institute of Directors would frown upon, despite overlooking a lot of other venality. As noted at What if?, the Government cannot afford to have tourists killed or suffering from power outages in their #1 tourist region in Central Otago, so it will not be open for Mr McLauchlan to go crawling to Minister Woodhouse, who doesn’t carry a lot of weight now in any case. McLauchlan’s other great fixer, fellow South Canterbury Finance trougher, Denham Shale, is now dead. Mr McLauchlan feeling the chilled air of exposure perhaps ? Perversely, we can be glad that Messrs Parton, Kempton, Thompson, McLauchlan and Frow are all….“thick as a brick”.

Final thought for the evening. If you were Grady Cameron and the board, and wanted to quickly replace 10,000 poles to “restore public confidence” then does buying steel poles from China that are made from less ductile steel (ie more brittle) sound like a good plan ? (Chinese steel is typically 20-25% ductile, whereas NZ seismic requirements generally require 32-34% ductility. It is near impossible to get Chinese steel at this ductility. A recent example is the problems with steel products imported from China by Steel & Tube). Yes readers, you heard it here first, not only did Mr Cameron fail to tell you where the $30M was coming from (they don’t know yet), he also neglected to mention they are buying steel poles from China. And remember, readers, not only did Mr Cameron describe this as “a good plan” on National Radio, but that he “was excited by it”. Truly…… “thick as a brick”.

Readers, your correspondent has nothing new to offer tonight —but just many examples of what we already knew : Delta/Aurora chief excutive Grady Cameron treats the facts with almost radioactive distaste, and is completely willing to say and do anything to save his own skin. Now, we have a “polemic” of evidence.Rob Hamlin is correct – there is a massive coverup underway. Let us consider Mr Cameron’s cancerous comments on RNZ with Guyon Espiner today :

The new Aurora plan with an extra $26M was ‘nothing to do with Richard Healey’ ….The board already had a plan in place because “back in September I went to the board and advised them that I wasn’t happy with the progress of our current plan in terms of how fast we were getting through the replacement programme” …. and “the plan that was announced yesterday was the revised plan”.

Now there are several obvious problems here, and the first is Mr Cameron’s mealy-mouthed dissembling that “back in September” he went to the board. September was only 5 weeks ago, and, just 4-5 weeks or so before that, in April 2016, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, Mr Cameron released Aurora’s long term Asset Management Plan (AMP), all 185 pages of it for the period 2016-2026. The specific purpose of this doorstop is to schedule “asset replacement”, and the plan of course specifically provides for pole replacement. Mr Cameron is asking us to believe that the very next week after the 10-year AMP was complete, he woke up and thought ‘Good grief ! We have completely messed up the asset management plan we have just had the board sign off, and which we have just spent months on ! We must re-do it immediately and add $20-30M to pole replacement ! That is Job #1 Today…. (after mid morning madeira cake and my daily PR strategy meeting). Readers, there are many at Delta who will confirm that Mr Cameron’s GM of Capability & Risk Matt Ballard, was instructing staff the exact opposite…. “that under no circumstances is the current $2.96M budget for pole replacement to be exceeded, for ANY reason, and GET USED TO IT”.

In the fantastic event that there is any shred of truth to this rubbish from Mr Cameron, he needs to be sacked for incompetence, because he has just shown he is incapable of producing an asset management plan that is credible or even somewhat reliable. It is so bad that Mr Cameron could be accused of numeric dyslexia. How can a board comprised of accountants, to whom forecasts and numbers are religion, put up with this ? Is it because Mr Cameron has promised them Mutually Assured Destruction if he was removed? There is plenty of evidence and emails to show that far from wanting to resolve this, Mr Cameron and his enablers wanted to play the man and sweep this under the rug, an approach that continues to the present day.

Your correspondent has received information that provides the translation code for Grady Cameron’s weasel worded dissembling “back in September I went to the board … not happy with the progress”. It is this : Mr Cameron advised the board ‘We employed incompetent staff who claimed they could “reinforce” poles for around $1200 each, to give a maximum 10-year extra life, but this $1,200 was a figure pulled from their own fevered imaginations and staff and contractors have told us to take a hike, it will cost around $3,000, which compares VERY unfavourably with the cost of a straightforward new pole with a 50-year life at around $5,000. Being the desperate incompetents we are, we had latched onto this half-baked and untested theory like a barnacle on a boat hull and assumed we could reinforce more than twice as many poles as we needed to replace over 10 years. (7290 reinforcements vs actually replacing just 3381 poles).’ (Readers, see Page 78 of the Aurora AMP). ‘If we do a half-baked reinforcement approach we have another budget problem of $13M, but if we put in all new poles we will have a blowout of around $28M (over and above the apples vs oranges $26M issue I deceived the board about earlier).’

Grady Cameron confidently stated to the nation that the plan unveiled yesterday “was the revised plan” (the board had approved)…. For about three seconds, and then when queried by Guyon Espiner incredulously “so nothing at all to do with Richard Healey ?”, Mr Cameron went into high range reverse and forward mode – at the same time. He responded “NO…. the plan that we’ve we put forward is a more aggressive plan now….” due to “a significant amount of public scrutiny”. Memo to Mr Cameron : The public scrutiny only started because Richard Healey broke ranks and blew the whistle, to the cost of his career.

Your correspondent thinks that Grady Cameron is also fevered and mainlining on dividends. If Mr Cameron was telling the truth, that he had concerns, and a plan that very coincidentally was the same as Richard Healey’s then why did he cancel the meeting with Richard Healey who wanted to discuss his concerns about the state of the network ? He should have been saluting a fellow soldier, not burying him…. Instead of refusing to meet with him, why did Mr Cameron discuss taking legal action against Richard Healey when Mr Healey was still an employee of Delta ? (Yes we know about this Mr Cameron, you have very few allies left within Delta —perhaps you should be looking next to you and channelling Shakespeare ….et tu, Matt Ballard?). Instead of cancelling the meeting, why did he not send an email to say, ‘Dear Richard, I have some fantastic news, all or most of your concerns are solved, we are going to be announcing a huge increase in pole spending of tens of millions of dollars immediately (just as soon as I can arrange the requisite saturation PR coverage that portrays me in the best possible light and take the focus off the Noble debacle). I would be delighted to meet with you for 3.5 minutes at 10.36am after mid-morning espresso and madeira cake to outline this to you. Your humble CEO, Grady.’

[thinkdelta.co.nz]

It is often the little things that give the game away…. And try as they might, the PR minders can never control the interview process. Grady Cameron spent several minutes explaining to the country how this was just a misunderstanding and he had – before Richard Healey (!), realised what was wrong, and he and the board had a plan to fix the very things that Mr Healey was complaining about. Guyon Espiner asked near the end, “Do you thank Richard Healey for putting pressure on you for this ?” ie for helping Grady Cameron receive great exposure in the media to explain his hitherto secret new plan to the nation, very similar to Mr Healey’s, that all was well, the network was aged but safe, lots of poles were being replaced. Instead of “Come back Richard, my fellow safety conscious soldier in arms, all is forgiven,” we and the country heard his CEO mask slip and got the real, petulant Grady Cameron who snarled “No I don’t thank Richard Healey” —proving that this was all just a charade, and Mr Cameron and the board were ropeable that they had been exposed as ineffectual and incompetent guardians of the region’s electricity network.

Continuing down the charade theme, consider this final thought for the evening, readers – Cameron, Crombie, and the board of accountants announced this plan WITHOUT ONE CLUE AS TO HOW IT IS TO BE FUNDED. This is sheer arrogance and disdain for power consumers and ratepayers – what other public expenditure of this level has ever been announced with no discussion about who or how it will be funded. The board of Delta and Aurora have proven yet again, how incompetent and derelict in their public duty they have become.

Anyone of sound mind will see that, as widely predicted, a vacuous tissue of lies and fabrication has flooded the media, with a SUDDEN dollop of RATES spend foretold – dished by the Ugly wide boys to the sound of chortles in repair from Our Enchained Melody (his worship).

ODT didn’t believe it either.

But those wheeling creatures.
Douglas Field starts in gently….

Satirical comment on the future of a Dunedin ‘owned’ utility company, and its imminent demise. Oct 31, 2016

****

Loss of “public confidence”…. [understatement]

In an interview, Mr Cull said he had no problem with spending an extra $26 million to fix a public perception issue.

### ODT Online Tue, 1 Nov 2016$30.25m to replace poles
By Vaughan Elder
Aurora Energy has approved a $30.25 million programme to replace close to 3000 power poles but its chief executive is refusing to admit any fault over the way the network has been managed. Aurora Energy and Delta chief executive Grady Cameron […] said the claims that led to the loss of confidence – that lives were at risk from dangerous power poles and the two council-owned companies put profits ahead of health and safety – were wrong. He admitted no fault in his management, saying the network was ageing, but safe.Read more

“My only wish is that he had taken the opportunity to come and speak to me directly, because I think if he had recognised the conversations that I was having with the board directly, he might have felt slightly different about what our plans were.” –Grady Cameron

Whistleblower Richard Healey was stunned by Mr Cameron’s response and questioned why Aurora would spend tens of millions of dollars to fix an issue which it said did not exist. “It’s utter rubbish,” Mr Healey said. […] He had tried to stay away from “personal” attacks, but was now willing to call on Mr Cameron to “man up” and resign.

—

T R U T H F U L ● R E A D I N G

Comments posted at this website the day after Story (TV3 Newshub 19.10.16) broke the news about Delta/Aurora’s dangerous poles:

Richard HealeyOctober 20, 2016 at 8:46 am
Thanks for the support, it’s been a difficult few years, but the last few weeks have been the worst. Here’s a clip from a post I made on Facebook to give my former colleagues some background. My primary concern in all of this has been to keep everyone safe. No more tragedies like the death of Roger Steel.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I appreciate the support but I really had no option. In the last six years I’ve seen live high voltage lines sit on the ground for two days in the grounds of a major tourist attraction – and another set alive 600mm off the ground inside a property where you can look over the fence and see a yard full of kids toys.
I’ve seen thousands of poles that could kill my work mates, and I’ve seen one of them die on one of those poles.
In the past 15 months I’ve watched as the number of those really dodgy structures has increased by more than 1000. The crunch came for me when I realised that probably 2000 of those poles should have been fitted with “warning, DO NOT CLIMB” tags – but they were missing.
Discovering those missing tags made my gut churn. In December 2010 Roger Steel, one of the world’s good buggers died after climbing a pole that was missing a red tag. Both the District Court and the Coroner cited the missing danger tag as a significant factor in Steelo’s death.
The obvious thing to do first was to put out a safety alert to Delta staff. I was told not to do that, my voice was seen as too negative and, in any case, it was the asset management team’s role to put out the alert. I was asked to get one of the other guys to request that an alert be sent out urgently.
I kept pushing for the alert to go out, at that stage I thought around 1000 poles were affected. Nothing happened. Finally, I got the opportunity to raise the issue in an operations meeting. I was told that the Network Operations Manager would write an alert. Scot Jefferries pointed out that I’d written one already but was ignored. He pointed out a second time that an alert had already been drafted. Eventually I was asked to send through my alert and informed that it would be used as the basis of the final release.
Here’s where it gets really disturbing, This is what I said in my Safety Alert:
“During a recent ICAM it became apparent that a large number of poles (probably less than 1000) have been tested and been found to be “Condition 1” – but no red tag has been applied to them”
This is what the alert that the company issued said:
“It was identified during a recent ICAM that some poles assessed as being defective may not have been Red tagged in accordance with Aurora procedures.”
“Have been found” turned into “may not” – “probably less than 1000” turned into “some poles”. The effect is pretty obvious, the guys were free to believe that a few poles might not have been tagged as opposed to a 1000-odd were definitely not tagged. I was pretty upset.
But it got worse, we sent crews out to apply the missing tags. Asset Management found out that we were doing that and told us to stop. They were creating a software tool to capture the data about what poles we were applying the tags to. We pointed out that we were capturing the poles and the tagging teams were logging all the data on a form which they signed. No problem you might think, the data can be loaded into the new software from the forms when it is eventually developed.
Problem, we were told to stop immediately and that we wouldn’t be paid for the work; when asked to put it in writing, they did!
Then it got worse. While out looking for a site to install some equipment I found a pole that the GIS (the system that holds all the information about the plant that makes up the network) said was Condition 5 (good for many decades) had a red tag on it. The red tag was legitimate, that pole was buggered.
It was then that I figured out that the data that the pole inspectors had gathered was being reassessed, after some software changes, and that the the condition ratings of hundreds of poles had been changed as a result. I wrote some notes. Here’s a sample (condition 0 means so bad you must replace it in 3 months, condition 6 is essentially a brand new pole):
“Pole 12680
This 72% degraded, 44 year old pole was Deuar tested on 19/06/2015, rated as condition 0 and red tagged. It also carries a remaining life assessment of 30 years. One week later it was reassessed and the rating went from 0 to 6. One month after that it was again reassessed and went from condition 6 to condition 1. Finally, on 19/08/2015 the condition assessment went from 1 to condition 6. ”
Those notes were taken to the CEO, he cancelled the meeting. I wrote to him, he has never replied, I quit, we are here today.

Richard HealeyOctober 20, 2016 at 8:57 am
I forgot to mention it, but on my last day at Delta two more poles fell down, both in Alexandra area. It looks to me like the company has failed to tag around two thousand poor condition poles, but the final number won’t be known until the end of the month. That’s the bad news, the good news is that crews are out there now nailing those tags to poles all over Dunedin and Central Otago.
My advice is this, if you’re dropping your kids off at school and notice the poles outside have suddenly sprouted red “do not climb” tags then ring Delta and ask about the condition of those poles and the risk they may pose to you and your kids. If a red tag suddenly appears on the pole outside your house, do the same thing.
Don’t be put off with a standard “the company takes your wellbeing very seriously” answer. Ask for specific information, when was the problem first identified, how long does Aurora have under the Electricity Safety regulations 2010, regulation 41 to replace the structure, what do I need to do to stay safe, what are the penalties that apply if Aurora fails in its primary duty of care?

Readers, your correspondent has decided that the present Delta/Aurora situation has many similarities to a drug deal gone wrong.

Grady Cameron and Matt Ballard have a drug problem, and the drug concerned is dividends. They are being stood over by their directorial pimps, Stuart McLauchlan, Trevor Kempton, Ian Parton, David Frow and ex ORFU beat-up specialist Steve Thompson (who are also heavy users of the dividends concerned), to produce more, more, more, every year. Despite the intimidation from the pimps, and threats of financial violence (if you don’t meet the most important KPI being $9.5M of dividends, no salary increase for you !), they bought themselves some breathing space, for a year or two, but down at the street corner (where the poles are !), Messrs Cameron and Ballard stopped looking after the infrastructure that laid the golden eggs of revenue a long time ago and stiff-armed them instead. The result ? – the “network” concerned voted with their cross-arms and simply “fell away” ….but who are the pimps working for ? Who has the raging dividend habit ? Who is the junkie that like all junkies, will engage in lies, fraud, misrepresentation as grist to its mill to feed its dividend habit ? It is of course the atrophied and hollowed out financial wreck that is the Forsyth Barr Stadium, that has a 40-year $7.2M dividend drug habit that it needs and feeds on for survival. Who allows this habit to continue and feeds off it also ? Mayor Cull, the Pablo Escobar of Portobello Rd.

While on the subject of addictive behaviour, Vaughan Elder and Chris Morris will also soon have a drinking problem, because from Saturday every time they venture into a bar, they will be shouted a drink by all Dunedinites that live or walk by a rotten power pole (all of them). The Otago Daily Times (ODT) had a flood of coverage and it was excellent, including a precise summary of the recent dismal Delta and Aurora history. Book your flights to the national media awards now guys. Hopefully this is the virtuous circle in action – excellent coverage, more ODTs and advertising sold, more resources given to the story, more revelations, more ODTs sold. Your correspondent has been proven to be very wrong in his earlier #EpicPowerFail post. Far from being missing in action, after a late start they are all over the issue, and instead of making us sick they are making us proud. Go ODT !!

Today your correspondent was alarmed at the offhand comment made by Pablo Escobar’s DCHL sideman, Mr Crombie, when he said in response to being grilled by the ODT that “the financial effects of replacing thousands of poles could be managed by changes to the timing of Aurora’s planned capital programme”.

There are two very important questions that arise from this – 1) How much will the replacement of the poles cost, and 2) what items of Aurora’s capital programme can be deferred.

Dealing with 2) first, Mr Crombie must have been mainlining on dividends and as high as a kite when he said this. Either that or there was a forlorn attempt at some more quarter truths and a desperate hope that the long term Aurora Asset Management Plan 2016-2026 (AMP) might disappear from the Internet. Your correspondent, fortified with a LOT of Bells did some heavy lifting through the 185-page document and can report the following pearls from Aurora’s own AMP that show that Mr Crombie, like so many addicts, is delusional :

Firstly, in the space of one year from 2015 to 2016, the state of the network (without the recent revelations) was so knackered that even with the best attempts of Matt Ballard, the Delta ‘General Manager for Risk and Capability’, to minimise capex by various sleights of hand, including the famous algorithms outlined in #EpicPowerFail 3, the amount of capital spending required ballooned – in the space of a year – from $373M to $443M, an increase of $70M. (AMP, 7.1 Financial Forecasts). Incredibly, Mr Cameron and the Board indulged in misrepresentation by reporting to DCHL that the total 10-year capital spending increase was only $417M, not $443M, by the simple and dishonest expedient of comparing
two different 10-year periods. This piece of elementary financial alchemy clearly escaped Mr Crombie and the other DCHL directorial head nodders also.

Councillors, please remember that Mr Crombie is going to lecture you in a month or two that you Must Lend $13.2M as a second mortgage to a shell company, Infinity Yaldhurst, with no visible means of support, because There Is No Alternative. It is clear from the above he either cannot read an elementary spreadsheet, or considers an error of around $26M of ratepayer funds trifling and not worthy of comment or correction. Coincidentally, this is the amount of the Yaldhurst debt. Not coincidentally, Mr Crombie doesn’t think $13M of ratepayer funds written off at Yaldhurst is significant or comment-worthy either. Where do we find these people ? You have been warned, Councillors.

To justify this sudden $70M increase in spending, the asset management plan helpfully provided some explanations of the scope of the work, and why it was urgent, which is going to haunt Mr Crombie, hopefully all the way to resignation. On Page 160, Aurora explained that “half of the increase is associated with deferred zone substation expenditure for which there is no further opportunity for deferral”.

In the next five years (2020-2022), there is $29M allocated for rebuilding worn out substations in Dunedin (Andersons Bay, Neville St, Smith St, Willowbank) that cannot be deferred. The reason that the substations are not being rebuilt before 2020 is because the major 11kV / 3kV lines that serve the substations are in even worse shape than the very aged substations built in the 1950s and early 1960s. The cables are already failing and have to be replaced even before the substations. Page 156 of the AMP helpfully describes the problem, “These cables are very old … These cables are now at the end of their life as the bronze tapes [that act to retain the gas insulation] are corroded and failing.” Regarding the possibility of failure, the AMP is candid “….have had some gas leaks … Gas leaks are difficult to locate and expense to repair … requires the cable to be out of service for several days for repairs to be made”. In relation to another type of cable, PILC cable, the ever helpful AMP notes, “We have had a number of failures of the Kaikorai Valley cables” [due to the oil impregnated cables leaking, then drying out and failing].

If readers are in any doubt as to how much of a knife edge their power network is being run on, Page 62 (Asset Risks 4.5.3) will spill the Bells all over the sofa : “Perhaps the most significant risk of a catastrophic asset failure relates to our remaining 33kV gas filled cables.”

To conclude, readers, Mr Crombie is simply creating yet more mad hatter conditions at Delta/Aurora with the desperate and inaccurate statement, that tens of millions of unplanned expenditure (the actual cost will be the subject of the next post, out of time and tea tonight !) could be accommodated by simple funding re-arrangement. (Deck chairs on the Titanic, anyone ?). There are more distortions at Delta/Aurora than in a fairground hall of mirrors.

The god awful millstone stadium is due to have its 5th birthday soon – ODT will be saturated, note bilge leaking into the Op-ed pages, already.

WE ONLY CARE ABOUT . . . .
THE UNMITIGATED UNPRINCIPLED FLOW OF RATEPAYER MONEY AT +$20MILLION PA to subsidise the Stadium, DVML/DVL, Professional Rugby and Grey Hair Events —meanwhile draining council owned company Aurora Energy of development capital sufficient to satisfy the regulator of lines companies, the Commerce Commission.

It is wrong. Criminal. (metaphorically!)

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### dunedintv.co.nz Wed, 27 Jul 2016Your word on local body elections
The Dunedin City Council is set to have some fresh blood in its midst with five current councillors confirming they won’t seek re-election. Many of those not standing have cited the large workload and increasing bureaucracy as a job deterrent. With that in mind our Word on the Street team asked the public whether they care about the upcoming local body elections.Ch39 Link

As part of the Community Access Service Level Agreement with Dunedin City Council, DVML has annual funding of $750,000 to allocate for community events/activities to be held at Forsyth Barr Stadium and the Dunedin Centre. The funding provides financial support to people, community groups and/or organisations that have a charitable status or are a not for profit organisation, to enable community users to utilise the facilities, resources and equipment across the venues.

The September funding applications have now been processed with 53 events/activities by 24 organisations receiving funding. A total of $267,819.60 has been allocated as follows:

█ The next round of funding for events happening 1 July to 31 December 2016, will open on 1 February and close on 4 March 2016. There are specific criteria which applicants must meet and the application form and policy can be downloaded at http://www.dunedinvenues.co.nz.

### ODT Online Wed, 9 Dec 2015Community groups get $267,819
Dunedin Venues Management Ltd has given more than $250,000 to community groups in its September funding round, it was confirmed yesterday. DVML marketing and communications manager Kim Barnes said as part of the community access service level agreement with Dunedin City Council, DVML had $750,000 in annual funding to allocate for community events and activities to be held at Forsyth Barr Stadium and the Dunedin Centre.Read more